purpose that Trajan
had been so earnest in his resistance to _hetaeriae_ or secret societies,
that, when a fire had laid waste Nicomedia, and Pliny proposed to him to
incorporate a body of a hundred and fifty firemen in consequence, he was
afraid of the precedent and forbade it.

What has been said will suggest another point of view in which the
oriental rites were obnoxious to the government--namely, as being
vagrant and proselytizing religions. If it tolerated foreign
superstitions, this would be on the ground that districts or countries
within its jurisdiction held them; to proselytize to a rite hitherto
unknown, to form a new party, and to propagate it through the empire--a
religion not local, but catholic--was an offence against both order and
reason. The State desired peace everywhere, and no change;
"considering," according to Lactantius, "that they were rightly and
deservedly punished who execrated the public religion handed down to
them by their ancestors."

It is impossible, surely, to deny that, in assembling for religious
purposes, the Christians were breaking a solemn law, a vital principle
of the Roman constitution; and this is the light in which their conduct
was regarded by the historians and philosophers of the empire. This was
a very strong act on the part of the disciples of the great apostle, who
had enjoined obedience to the powers that be. Time after time they
resisted the authority of the magistrate; and this is a phenomenon
inexplicable on the theory of private judgment or of the voluntary
principle. The justification of such disobedience lies simply in the
necessity of obeying the higher authority of some divine law; but if
Christianity were in its essence only private and personal, as so many
now think, there was no necessity of their meeting together at all. If,
on the other hand, in assembling for worship and holy communion, they
were fulfilling an indispensable observance, Christianity has imposed a
social law on the world, and formally enters the field of politics.
Gibbon says that, in consequence of Pliny's edict, "the prudence of the
Christians suspended their _agapae_; but it was _impossible_ for them to
omit the exercise of public worship." We can draw no other conclusion.

At the end of three hundred years a more remarkable violation of law
seems to have been admitted by the Christian body. It shall be given in
the words of Dr. Burton; he has been speaking of Maximin's edict, which